Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  Toward the end of the interview, Bryan recalled the first time he and Pulitzer met. It was in Washington, after Bryan’s loss in the election of 1896. “He tried to see my face and feel my bumps.” Bryan said. “He felt my chin and jaw and commented on it. Tell him this jaw is stronger and firmer than ever.”

  The Republicans enthusiastically gave their nomination to Roosevelt in June 1904 while the Democrats continued to squabble. When the Democratic Party gathered in St. Louis, Bryan’s plans were still undisclosed. If he backed Hearst, who had courageously supported his bids in 1896 and 1900, Bryan could split the convention. It seemed likely that this was his plan. His opening speech drew cheers of “Bryan, Bryan!” and Governor Hill agreed to omit any reference to the gold standard in the platform to appease Bryan’s supporters. As dawn approached, after a long night of speeches, Bryan made his intentions known. He declined to support Hearst and instead seconded the nomination of a free silver candidate. Parker won the nomination on the first ballot and Hearst was left out in the cold.

  As the Democrats settled on their nominee, Pulitzer returned to New York from Aix-les-Bains. He sailed home on the Baltic, along with J. P. Morgan, who continued to give him wide berth, especially after suffering through a monthlong rehash of the gold bond affair in the World that May. The articles, which also appeared in 2 million pamphlets, were Pulitzer’s handiwork. As he told his staff, he wanted the history of how Morgan and his cronies “swindled Cleveland, government, nation,” to be told “so that every child can understand.

  Pulitzer was elated that his man was the choice of the Democratic convention. But his obsession with cleansing the party of Bryanism soon crippled the nominee’s prospects. William Speer, a reporter for the World, was on leave to serve as Parker’s secretary. Working through Speer, Pulitzer insisted that Parker force the party to swear allegiance to the gold standard. Parker acquiesced and sent a telegram from his Hudson River estate to St. Louis, saying that he regarded the gold standard as sacred and that he would decline the nomination if the party didn’t agree. Riled but exhausted, the delegates complied by giving him the nomination on his terms, and returned home still deeply divided on the currency issue.

  Although Bryan and Hearst were beaten and he had his man as the party’s standard-bearer, Pulitzer was not complacent. He knew how to read an electoral map. Parker ran a lackluster campaign, modeled on those of the past, when a candidate did not sully himself with speeches or touring. But Bryan and Roosevelt, with their stirring stump speeches and national tours, had so altered the political landscape that such antiquated behavior was a prescription for defeat. If Parker wouldn’t take on Roosevelt, Pulitzer would.

  From Bar Harbor, Pulitzer ordered Merrill to go after George Cortelyou, Roosevelt’s former secretary of commerce and labor. As chairman of the Republican Party, Cortelyou supervised the collection of funds from corporate leaders and financiers for the president’s election campaign. Pulitzer told Merrill to compare the party chief to the nefarious Boss Tweed, and to demand that Republicans open their books so that the public could see how much money was coming into the president’s coffers from trust, monopolies, and corporations facing possible federal prosecution.

  Pulitzer had long sought to end corporate campaign donations, but the government was still three years away from imposing a ban. “Roosevelt is very culpable, or at least, under suspicion for not having put through bills to prevent it in Washington. All the more because he consented to the amazing impropriety of making his Secretary of Commerce, collector of these very contributions and making him afterwards Postmaster General.”

  Merrill did his best as the fall campaign got under way, but his efforts paled in comparison with Pulitzer’s own editorial, which appeared on October 1, 1904. Written as an open letter to the president, it was vintage Pulitzer, of the kind readers had not seen in years. Pulitzer castigated Roosevelt for failing to keep his pledge to remove the veil of secrecy from the affairs of corporations.

  Stretching across two pages, the editorial sustained its intensity to the end. Pulitzer reminded readers that Roosevelt had created a special government agency to “get the facts” on corporations but had done nothing with it. “The Bureau of Corporations was organized February 26, 1903—more than 19 months, more than 80 weeks—exactly 583 days ago—yes, exactly 583 days ago,” wrote Pulitzer. Line after line, Pulitzer pointed out that the agency had obtained no documents, subpoenaed no witness, and exposed no restraint of trade or corporate misdoing, repeating the refrain “after these 583 days” with each accusation.

  Returning to his bête noire, Pulitzer charged that Cortelyou was collecting tribute from corporations in return for a promise of protection. Then, he posed ten repetitive questions, set in boldface type. They began with “How much has the beef trust contributed to Mr. Cortelyou?” and continued through each important trust—paper, coal, oil, steel, etc.—until the last one: “How much have the six great railroads contributed to Mr. Cortelyou?”

  The ten questions became an instant hit with Democrats, who were desperate for a weapon to use against their foe. It wasn’t long before Democratic speakers began to lead their audiences into chants of “How much? How much? How much?” The actual answer was far less than Pulitzer surmised, especially as corporate leaders had little doubt that Roosevelt would win. Cortleyou declined to respond publicly, but sent a private message to Pulitzer. He took one of the World’s reporters by the arm in a hotel lobby in Washington. “As God is my witness,” he said, “I am conducting an absolutely clean campaign. I have not coerced a penny out of anyone, and my order from the start has been to accept no money on a pledge of any sort whatsoever.” The message fell on deaf ears. Pulitzer continued his attacks.

  Roosevelt considered the attacks an attempt to divert attention from the Democrats’ equally odious money-raising tactics. In the end, he easily dispatched Parker, who took a drubbing even in his home state. The results did little to change Pulitzer’s antipathy toward Roosevelt. He promised that the World would remain a thorn in Roosevelt’s side as he began his first full term as president. “The World,” Pulitzer wrote, “thinks no more of his military megalomania and his swashbuckler tendencies than it did before; but the returns prove that an overwhelming majority of voters had no such misgiving.”

  As 1905 began, Pulitzer once again considered an offer by Charles Knapp, the publisher of the St. Louis Republic, to buy the Post-Dispatch. Knapp had not lost his desire to acquire the Post-Dispatch, despite the discordant end to his last round of negotiations with Pulitzer several years earlier. This time he teamed up with Pulitzer’s friend David Francis, who had been governor of Missouri and a member of Cleveland’s cabinet. In February, during a carriage ride around Jekyll Island, Francis laid out his plan. Essentially, Pulitzer would get $2.5 million in long-term bonds at 8 percent interest. Since Pulitzer did not decline the proposal, Francis left believing he had a deal.

  When Francis returned to St. Louis he was shocked to learn that Pulitzer was seeking more cash and fewer loans. He protested that the publisher was changing the terms of their agreement. “Answering your telegram,” replied Pulitzer, “you accepted nothing except your own imagination.” In the end, the unsigned documents that had been drawn up were forwarded to Seitz in New York; he locked them away in a safe-deposit box. It was the last time Pulitzer would toy with the idea of giving up the newspaper that had launched his career as a publisher.

  Francis was not the only one to suffer from Pulitzer’s fickleness that winter. President Butler of Columbia University was astonished to learn that his new benefactor no longer wanted to proceed with the plan to build a journalism school. The university had custody of half of the promised $2 million and was ready to proceed. But the fight over the advisory board had left bruised feelings on both sides and Pulitzer altered the terms of his gift. He left it to Merrill to explain his actions.

  “Mr. Pulitzer is alone responsible for the present delay,” Merrill told reporters. “His present deter
mination is that actual establishment of the college of journalism shall be postponed until his death.” He explained that Pulitzer’s fragile health prevented him from devoting the necessary time to the project, that a suitable leader for the college had not been located, and that waiting until his death would remove any suggestion that Pulitzer was unduly interfering with Columbia’s decisions on how to set up the college, although in fact he was.

  “To avoid all uncertainties or misconceptions,” Merrill said, “I may add that the endowment of this college is absolutely irrevocable, and its establishment beyond a shadow of doubts.” All would have to wait, however, for Pulitzer’s death. Columbia would pay him the income from the $1 million it held, and Butler began a deathwatch.

  On April 10, 1905, Joseph turned fifty-eight. Kate sent birthday wishes from London. “At least you have the consolation of feeling that your life, though full of worries and much unhappiness, has been full of achievement too, that you will have left your mark in your generation,” she wrote. But the birthday reminded Joseph of his mortality and his ever-present fear that his achievement—the World—would die with him. In his eyes, neither Ralph nor Joe was preparing for a future role as a newspaper owner. He reminded Ralph that heirs, such as those in the Gould family, were often forced to sell their inherited businesses. “I wish I could still more strongly impress upon you, and above all on Joe, and your mind the necessity of the proprietor’s ability to manage his property,” he said.

  Newspaper management was not foremost on Ralph’s mind. He had been courting Frederica Webb, who was the great-granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and thus a member of a family the World routinely assailed and ridiculed. He was getting up the courage to tell his controlling father that he had asked her to marry him. Ralph had cause to worry. For Joseph’s children, any encounter with their father could go wrong. One night at dinner the prior fall, Joseph had told Edith that she must cease riding Constance’s horse, which was recuperating from an injury. Edith began to defend herself, but her father cut her off. When she complained, he laughingly said he would probably interrupt her again but that she should continue.

  “Oh dear!” exclaimed Edith on the verge of tears. “If anything happens to any horse everybody comes to me about it and everybody says I am to blame. It is not fair. I am tired of this. I will not have it.”

  “What do you say?” a startled Joseph asked.

  “I say I am tired of these accusations,” Edith replied.

  “Please remember you are talking to your father.”

  “Certainly, but I must defend myself. It is not fair.”

  “Fair or not fair, don’t forget that you are talking to your father. If you are going to talk that way, I wish you would leave the table.”

  “I was going when you came, but I came back to talk to you.”

  “I don’t want you to talk to me in that way. I don’t want you at the table if you intend to talk that way. Don’t come to the table. Don’t come back to the table at all.”

  Kate had mailed her birthday greeting to Joseph from London because the celebrated artist John Singer Sargent was painting her portrait there. Both she and Joseph had long sought a chance to sit for Sargent. James Tuohy, the World’s London bureau chief, was given the assignment to procure the sittings. Like most emissaries, Tuohy had found it hard to meet with Sargent. “He requires very delicate handling, and is absolutely overwhelmed with commissions,” he had reported two years earlier. Pulitzer’s longtime friend and companion George Hosmer was also enlisted in the effort and tried to chase down Sargent when he came to Boston. “Will pay anything he wants,” Pulitzer telegraphed Hosmer.

  Finally the painter consented to having Kate sit for him. “He seems greatly interested in the portrait,” Kate excitedly wrote to Joseph after her first day with Sargent. “He is a wonderful artist. I think a genius, his portraits haunt one, he has two or three in his studio now which are quite wonderful.” As he sketched her, Sargent told Kate stories of other sittings, describing one of his subjects as “the most objectionable type of a money-grasping, vulgar, Sixth Avenue Jew,” oblivious of the fact that Kate had married a Jew.

  By mid-May, the sittings came to an end. The completed painting showed Kate in a beguiling pose, standing by a table, her hair coiffed toward the back of her head, her arms to her side, wearing a low-cut dress with many folds and ruffles. She looks demurely outward as if watching someone. In Aix-les-Bains, Joseph received a firsthand report on the portrait from Edith, who wired him an excited appraisal upon its completion. Joseph sent his thanks to the painter. “Sincere thanks on behalf of future generations,” he wrote. “Alas, alas that I cannot see it myself.” After much inveigling by Kate, Sargent agreed to paint Joseph as well. “I feared it was a hopeless task when I broached the subject as he had refused so many,” Kate wrote to Joseph, “but a woman can coax a really great man into any halfway reasonable thing.”

  Her portrait complete, Kate left England for a cure in France in the company of Constance and Edith. Instead of joining Joseph in Aix-les-Bains, she went to Divonne-les-Bains. There Kate was told that Catherine Davis, her ninety-year-old mother, who had fallen ill a few weeks earlier, was dead. Although the news was not unexpected, its arrival hit Kate hard. “She collapsed entirely and has been neither able to eat nor sleep since, even with very large doses of medicine each night,” Maud Alice Macarow, her faithful companion, wrote to Joseph.

  Kate wanted to leave and return immediately to the United States. Her doctor, however, insisted that she remain in Divonne-les-Bains. Joseph concurred. “I forbid your mother sailing,” he wired Edith. “Both you and Constance must do your utmost to comfort your mother.” He instructed Joe, who was in New York, and his secretary George Ledlie to attend the funeral in Washington, where Catherine Davis had lived with her other daughter, Clara. But a day later, Joseph changed his mind. “If you are feeling strongly to sailing, upon reflection, I withdraw my objection.” By then, Kate had reconciled herself to missing the funeral.

  Almost in a pique of jealousy that Kate’s illness outranked his, Joseph sent her one of the angry, spiteful letters he was so capable of writing. Fortunately for Kate, neither Macarow nor Edith had the courage to give her the letter. When he returned to his senses, Joseph asked to have it back. “I am glad you wish your letter to Mother returned as it will be a long time, I fear, before she is in a fit condition to read it. She, of course, knows nothing at all about it,” said nineteen-year-old Edith, well accustomed to her father’s volatile moods.

  Unaware of her husband’s intercepted missive, Kate completed a long-planned, loving gesture for Joseph. Since before their marriage, he had carried a watch in which was encased a photograph of his late mother. It survived the house fire but was damaged. Kate had brought the watch to London to be repaired. Her consideration extended farther. She had hired an artist to reproduce the miniature portrait of her husband’s mother on a large scale. The finished reproduction disappointed her but she sent it on anyway. “I fear it is too small for you to see but at least you can feel that you have a picture of your mother,” she wrote, adding that she would have an even larger one made.

  Pulitzer took his turn before Sargent in June 1905. Tuohy, the London bureau chief, put aside his regular duties to prepare for Pulitzer’s arrival. By now he was used to doing the personal jobs that came with the post. In this case, he made sure that the bedroom windows in the London house Pulitzer rented were refitted with thick plate glass and that Pulitzer’s horse, which had been sent ahead of time, was getting acclimatized.

  Accompanying Pulitzer to London was Norman G. Thwaites, the thirty-two-year-old son of a British parson. A veteran of the Boer War, Thwaites had joined the cadre of secretaries in 1902. He had been recruited by Tuohy, who referred to the hunt for secretaries as the “pursuit of white mice.” Pleasing Pulitzer was nearly impossible. He insisted on hiring unmarried men who could freely travel anywhere in the world. He even dictated that he would hire no short me
n. “As I have to walk with my companion,” the six-foot two-inch Pulitzer explained, “I don’t like to stoop too low.” To find a suitable candidate Tuohy and Butes had to parse as many as 100 applicants responding to discreet advertisements placed in British newspapers.

  When Thwaites first called on Pulitzer, he was brought into a room where Butes was furiously sorting out stacks of applications. Overwhelmed by their number, Butes was preparing to send Thwaites away when Pulitzer suddenly walked in. After introductions were made, Pulitzer brought Thwaites over to the window. He ran his long tapered fingers over the man’s head and face and then asked Thwaites to take him by his arm for a walk in the garden. In stronger light, Pulitzer could still distinguish contours of people and objects, but not much more.

  The two strolled about for an hour discussing books and plays; this gave Thwaites, a consummate London theatergoer, a chance to impress Pulitzer. It also bode well that he spoke German, could write shorthand, and knew how to ride horses. His soothing reading voice tipped the balance in his favor, and Pulitzer offered him a trial. In the three years since, Thwaites had become one of Pulitzer’s most trusted men.

  On this trip, Thwaites had the task of taking Pulitzer for a ride in the park each day before the sittings at Sargent’s legendary studio on Tite Street. The painter was a stickler for punctuality, and Kate had warned Joseph, “You will have to be on time as he gets very nervous and out of sorts if one is at all late.” Pulitzer assumed that at their first meeting Sargent would want to talk and maybe, at best, execute a few sketches. The painter, however, was in no mood to chat. He immediately placed a canvas on his easel and went to work. “Sometimes I get a good likeness, so much the better for both of us,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t—so much the worse for my subject but I make no attempt to represent anything but what the outward appearance of a man or woman indicates.”